El Paso, Elsewhere and ? – Zero Punctuation

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, and Chrono Trigger.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about The dreadful walk-and-talk, AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

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El Paso, Elsewhere and ? Zero Punctuation Transcript

I’ve often noted that retro-style media is always nostalgic for the period roughly twenty years ago, hence 90s-style boomer shooters being in for a while because it makes 35-year-old game designers nostalgic for that time they made a custom level for Doom based on their high school and ended up in Guantanamo Bay. But like a walrus in a food coma rolling down a hill, the nostalgia wave always moves on. And exactly twenty years ago the PC boomer shooters were ceding ground to the rise of the console shooter, and third person shooters such as Max Payne, in which the camera hovered overhead like a fussy mum with an overly stocked first aid kit, slow-motion bullet time combat was pioneered to compensate for the lack of a mouse and console users being generally slower of thought from all the time they spent chewing the paint off of their Wavebirds, and the main character was rather self-indulgently modelled on the game’s lead designer with a look on his face like he was hoping binge eating sour gummies would help his chronic constipation. And now inevitably we have a new retro indie shooter that takes a very obvious and openly acknowledged influence from Max Payne, especially the self indulgent bit.

El Paso Elsewhere, designed by Xalavier Nelson, in which we play paranormal detective James Savage, voiced by Xalavier Nelson, as he bullet-time dual-pistols his way through level after level of monster-haunted labyrinths to the tune of an original hip hop soundtrack. Composed and performed by Xalavier Nelson. And the plot is, James Savage has to save the world by confronting his evil blood-sucking vampire bitch of an ex-girlfriend. And if I were any of Xalavier Nelson’s former partners I’d certainly be narrowing my eyes at this point. Self-indulgent is the word of the day, and that certainly comes across over the fifty-odd levels of James Savage’s angsty monologuing in a voice like a bloke with a blocked nose trying to seduce the microphone in the middle of a noisy building site. The exact method by which his evil ex-girlfriend is attempting to destroy the world is a bit unclear, one might almost think that aspect of the plot was included solely to turn James Savage’s masturbatory airing out of his personal issues into an act of self-sacrificing heroism. So this all might come across as a bit cringeworthy, especially when the self-penned hip hop tracks kick in and we hear lyrics that one might imagine scrawled across the back of Xalavier Nelson’s high school homework diary.

But get past all that and El Paso Elephantine plays like a fun snacky arcade shooter, “arcade” being a nice way of saying “repetitive” but it’s sort of impressive that they squeezed fifty levels out of about four visual themes and ten furniture assets. The Max Payne-style high-octane shooting comes across well enough, complete with slow motion bullet dive, which you’ll swiftly learn is completely pointless ‘cos you can turn slow motion on and off at any time and diving kinda messes with your aim, but hey, it looks cool. It’s one of those games that’s very hard to stop playing once you start. You say “Okay, I’ll quit after this level ‘cos I think my kids got into the steak knives.” And then four or five levels later you’re like “Oh well, sounds like at least one of them’s still alive.” And I put that down to the game’s simplicity. Explore a maze, shoot everything in it, it’s like Pac-Man having a Vietnam flashback. And it flows well ‘cos between the slow-mo and most enemies dying in two or three shots and ammunition boxes practically bleeding out of the skirting boards, it’s a surprisingly easy game. I say surprisingly ‘cos when editor Nick and I first played the demo at GDC, we both found it really hard in a Hotline Miami kinda way.

I’d hate to think Xalavier Nelson scaled the difficulty back before release ‘cos all the game journalists were crapping out at it. Game journalists in the middle of a convention who’ve been alternating between jogging to hotel room demos and freebasing heroin don’t make a good control group. So final summary, El Paso Elderberry is a fun if repetitive callback shooter that’s essentially the nightmare sequence from Max Payne drawn out for six or seven hours and while the story frequently has the air of Xalavier Nelson’s Geocities poetry page, that also makes it feel very personal, which I’d take any day over the usual committee-designed drivel that’s about as personal as an industrial sheep dip. And of the two games I wanna talk about this week, it is undoubtedly the good one. Although frankly that’s not worth much, because the other game compares unfavourably to a Ryvita smeared with catarrh. The game is (record scratch)

Right, well, I have to pause things there, because I had this whole review ready but then a day before it was due I was informed that the game’s embargo date had changed. I didn’t play any other games this week, nor do I have the time to make an entire other review, so please enjoy the scheduled review with all identifying elements removed. Why not have fun trying to guess what it is? Here’s a hint: it’s not Armored Core 6.

A game I’ve been wanting to talk about because I’m pretty sure it’s completely f***ing terrible.
(title redacted) is what happens when someone tries to knock off Hades without having the slightest clue what makes Hades good. So it’s a roguelite dungeon crawler in which (redacted) descends through a sequence of randomized levels while collecting blessings from associated god-like entities, except there’s only, like, three blessings total so you usually get all of them in every run. And none of them do anything to fundamentally alter the core gameplay, which consists of running up to dudes and biffing them in the mush. Seven billion times. It’s a beat ’em up with a third person over shoulder camera which isn’t great for visibility but is perfect if you’re really curious about the contours of a bathrobe. And every room in every level is the same. Some shitty one hit kill minions you needn’t worry about and two or three big lads with spongy health bars and basically the same attacks. You pick one of the latter and start duffing them up, but with a control system that feels like (redacted) is immersed to the waist in marshmallow fluff and has the leashes of two large, curious dogs tied to his wrists. And yet, the game’s still insultingly easy, ‘cos the enemy AI’s as formidable as a large, curious dog trying to lick a piece of kibble out of a hairbrush. So in contrast to El Paso Emerald Hill Zone (redacted) is the bad kind of repetitive that’s like trying to eat an entire bucket of gravel through a straw.

I got through all four dungeons on my second go, whereupon the game went “Oh no a plot development! Go through all four dungeons again but slightly bigger!” So I did that without a single death, and the game went “Oh no! Another plot development! Time to take the fight to the main baddie!” “I don’t suppose we do that by going through all four dungeons a third time?” “Hey, did you peek behind my DM screen?” This time through I died once during the final boss because I committed the classic mistake of forgetting not to clip through the floor during the opening cutscene. (redacted) is the kind of bad that makes me paranoid. Like maybe I missed something. Maybe there was a checkbox in the options menu labelled “remove shittiness.” Maybe I didn’t notice the tutorial message for the “activate jetpack” button. ‘Cos the alternative is that an entire studio got through the development and release of a game with a relatively well known IP attached that presumably has its own controllers keeping an eye on things, and at no point did anyone raise a hand and say “Has anyone else noticed our game’s a load of old flystruck sheep placenta?” I don’t know if I want to live in that world, I mean, what if I have a medical emergency around such people? They’d probably get confused and stick chewable vitamins up my arse.